Europe has a "lot riding on" securing continued defence co-operation with Britain after it has left the EU, the former advisor to French president Emmanuel Macron Francois Heisbourg has said in a CER podcast.

Christian Odendahl is one of the finest analysts of the German economy writing in English. So it’s worth your time to closely read his review of the country’s labour market reforms of the early 2000s, sometimes called “Agenda 2010” or the “Hartz Reforms”.

The European Arrest Warrant (EAW) has made it easier for the UK to extradite criminals. But once it leaves the EU, Britain will find it almost impossible to negotiate as good an arrangement as the EAW.

Obituary

“The UK government knows that some of the member-states are worried about the commission’s position that transition arrangements cannot be discussed until ‘sufficient progress’ has been made on divorce arrangements and agreeing the final relationship,” said Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform. “They are hoping the Nordics in particular will put pressure on Barnier to acknowledge quickly that sufficient progress has been made on those areas.”

Christian Odendahl, chief economist at think-tank the Centre for European Reform, said that despite the efforts to distance the plan from the concept of debt mutualisation, Germany was likely to regard it with suspicion.“The Germans feel that this is a clever way of persuading them to sign up to something which at least has the potential to become debt mutualisation by the back door,” he said. “Particularly if there was an agency doing the structuring and sales of these products, the markets would perceive that as 100 per cent safe and expect a bailout if it goes wrong.”

Professor Alan Winters, director of the UK Trade Policy Observatory at the University of Sussex described the proposals as "vague and aspirational" - a view echoed by John Springford, director of research at the Centre for European Reform think-tank, who accused the government of "constructive ambiguity".

But migration expert John Springford, of the Centre for European Reform, warned the “golden age of British retirees heading to the Costas is probably over”. And he told the Guardian: “Retirees are expensive. There is no way Spain would allow lots of Brits to retire there and use their health system unless young Spanish people could come and work in the UK. If we don’t have free movement, it’s very unlikely we’d have retirement rights.”

“The golden age of British retirees heading to the Costas is probably over,” said John Springford, a migration expert who is director of research at the Centre for European Reform. He pointed to research that found that while young immigrants provided an economic boost in most OECD countries, people turned into a net drain on national finances somewhere between the age of 40 and 45.

Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform think-tank, said such a proposal had merit and could allow the Brexit talks to progress to the next phase. “There is a strong feeling among UK and EU officials that the best way to present the Brexit bill is as payments during a transition, in return for market access,” he said. “Three years of paying about £10 billion a year would mean the UK handing over a large part of what the EU wants — not all of it, but enough to create goodwill and probably to get the EU to talk about trade.”

A paper by economist Christian Odendahl of the Centre for European Reform questions this account of Hartz, finding that the total number of hours worked in Germany has barely increased since the end of the 1990s, while the number of low-paid jobs and of Germans at risk of poverty have both spiked during the same period.

Not all economists are saluting the Germans, however, nor are they all overly impressed by the latest rosy assessment of the bloc’s performance. Simon Tilford of the Centre for European Reform said the austerity program made matters worse in Greece, and that country has still not really rebounded.

Chair: Charles Grant, CER, Juliet Samuel, Columnist, The Telegraph, Vicky Ford, MP for Chelmsford, Andrea Leadsom, MP for South Northamptonshire, Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons, Dominic Grieve, MP for Beaconsfield (TBC) and Konrad Szymański, Secretary of State for European Affairs, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Poland (TBC)

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Winner of the Prospect 2015 Think Tank of the Year Award - UK International Affairs